Once Upon a Car Part 11

Henderson was meeting with the union's VEBA team in one room when he heard about the progress being made at the main table. By Sat.u.r.day night, September 23, he had been negotiating for thirty-six straight hours, running on adrenaline and optimism. This was the most important labor deal in Detroit history, and GM was almost there. The contract was in sight.

Then, at about ten minutes to midnight, Gettelfinger barged into the conference room, grabbed Henderson by the arm, and pulled him out. "What are you doing, man?" he said with a wild look in his eye. "We've got to get a deal done here! I've got all these people in this room."

He dragged Henderson to the main room and opened the door. It was jammed with GM and union bargainers. The noise level was off the charts. Henderson thought this was a great sign. But then Gettelfinger started ranting and swearing.

"G.o.dd.a.m.n it, we have got to go in there, and we've got to get a deal done!" he yelled. "Where are we? Where are we, d.a.m.n it? What are we going to do? What are you going to do?" He was jumping up and down, cussing in Henderson's face.

The union guys didn't know what was going on. Their president seemed to have snapped. "What are we going to do?" Gettelfinger shouted at Henderson. "We've got to get a deal here!"

Henderson took a deep breath. "What," he said, "in the next ten minutes?"

That broke the tension. One of the union bargainers started laughing. Gettelfinger glared at Henderson and then stormed into the conference room, slamming the door behind him. Henderson took a moment to clear his head. Ron must be under a ton of pressure, he thought.

But the VEBA was really close. GM had agreed to a 63 percent funding commitment. Only a few more big items were on the table, including the all-important cash bonus to entice members to vote for the agreement. The negotiations seemed to be in the home stretch.

Then on Sunday night, Gettelfinger came back into the room, visibly agitated. "I don't think we're getting a final agreement," he said. "You guys think you're making so much progress, but you're not. We're setting a strike deadline." Then he walked out.

When Henderson heard about it, he called Wagoner. "They set a deadline," he said. "Eleven o'clock tomorrow morning." He also made sure calls were made to the senior labor execs at Ford and Chrysler. He wanted them ready in case of a strike. The Project Compa.s.s papers had to be signed fast if it happened. The whole plan was predicated on GM standing its ground and the other companies backing it up.

At 10:15 A.M. on Monday, September 24, there was still no final agreement. The union negotiators picked up and left the bargaining room. The GM team-Fritz Henderson, Troy Clarke, and lead negotiator Diana Tremblay-weren't sure what would happen next. They found out at eleven o'clock when they learned that the United Auto Workers had just gone out on strike against General Motors.

Tens of thousands of employees began streaming out of GM plants across the country, the first nationwide walkout during contract talks in more than thirty years. Within minutes, picket lines formed outside factories. At the company's a.s.sembly plant in the Detroit enclave of Hamtramck, workers wielded UAW ON STRIKE signs as they marched in the street. All of the defiance, frustration, and anger of the last three tough years came pouring out in a swell of emotion. "It's about time the union stood up against the company and stood for the people!" one of the workers, Sylvia Hill, told reporters.

At Solidarity House, Gettelfinger and his entire bargaining team a.s.sembled for a dramatic press conference on live television. It was like the calendar had been turned back decades to the days when the union flexed its muscles and brought Detroit to its knees. "n.o.body wants a strike," Gettelfinger said to the cameras. "But there comes a time when somebody pushes you off a cliff. And that's exactly what has happened."

Henderson and the GM labor execs were down the hall from a now-empty bargaining room while they watched on television. Pushed off a cliff? What the h.e.l.l did that mean?

"Oh my G.o.d," Henderson moaned. "This is the theater of the absurd." Then, all of a sudden, he heard Gettelfinger change his tone on TV. "If they want to sit down," the union chief said, "we're ready to go." The GM executives looked at one another for a moment. They want to come back to the table?

Henderson gathered himself. "Okay, if they come back, we're going to pick it back up like nothing happened," he said. "And we'll get this thing done and done quickly." But before anything else, he had to make two phone calls. It was time to reach out to Ford and Chrysler. Henderson had no idea how long this strike would last. The Project Compa.s.s doc.u.ments had to be signed immediately. His first call was to Joe Laymon at Ford.

"Okay, Joe," he said. "We've got to sign these things."

There was silence on the line for a second, and then Laymon spoke up. "We're not going to do it," he said.

Henderson was speechless. He was so mad he could feel the blood rus.h.i.+ng to his head. After all the meetings and strategy sessions, Ford was going to screw GM and back out? He had suspected it all along. But to wait until now, when the union was out walking the picket line?

Laymon spoke again before Henderson could react. "I thought you would have known we weren't going to sign," he said.

That put Henderson over the edge.

"You should have told me!" he shouted back. "You could have at least called me before we were on strike!"

He slammed down the phone. He wasn't even going to bother calling Chrysler. There was too much to do.

But then, just like that, the whole situation turned. At 2:00 P.M. the entire UAW team, including Gettelfinger, returned to the bargaining table. They were ready to talk.

Henderson and his labor execs didn't even mention the word "strike." They acted like it was business as usual and began negotiating. While the nation watched striking workers parading around GM plants on live TV, the talks resumed at a feverish pace. Henderson and Gettelfinger sat across from each other, surrounded by their teams, and went through the deal line by line.

They nailed down the VEBA. GM committed to put nearly $30 billion in cash and stock into the new health care trust-an astonis.h.i.+ng number given its precarious financial condition. The union, in turn, agreed to its first two-tier wage system in history. Gettelfinger got his job guarantees when the company pledged to a.s.sign new products to at least fourteen of its U.S. a.s.sembly plants. And to clinch the whole deal, GM would give each of its seventy-three thousand active workers a $3,000 signing bonus, then lump-sum payments in the second, third, and fourth years of the deal.

At 3:05 A.M. on Wednesday, September 26, the union and GM announced a tentative agreement on a new four-year contract. The strike was officially over, forty hours and five minutes after it started. General Motors immediately put out a statement by Rick Wagoner: "This agreement helps us close the fundamental compet.i.tive gaps that exist in our business," he said.

Then the news media filed into Solidarity House early in the morning to hear what Gettelfinger had to say. His negotiators looked haggard and sleep-deprived, but he seemed full of energy. "We feel very good about this tentative agreement," he said. "I think the strike helped our side more than theirs."

That was about it. He was moving on-to Chrysler and Ford.

Chapter Twenty-Two.

Gettelfinger had to call the strike to seal the agreement. The UAW had cut a phenomenal deal. General Motors agreed to pay $5 billion for retiree health care until the new trust kicked in, and almost $30 billion in two years to fund it. On paper, the fund amounted to a $90,000 contribution to the medical plans of each of 340,000 retired workers and their surviving loved ones. How GM would come up with that kind of money was another question.

It was the single most expensive retiree program in American corporate history. And despite GM's dire financial straits, active workers kept everything-their health care, pensions, and full wages. They didn't care that new hires would earn $14 an hour when their $28-an-hour paychecks were safe. But the big "get" for the union was the product commitments. The contract saved fourteen GM a.s.sembly plants, with two others kept open temporarily. After the deluge of buyouts, the heart of the union's largest employer was still intact.

Chrysler would be tougher. The plants and the local union officials were more urban and militant, and the company had the greatest concentration of big a.s.sembly plants in and around Detroit-Jefferson North, Sterling Heights a.s.sembly, Dodge Truck, Jeep down in Toledo. Gettelfinger had stiffed Dieter Zetsche and Chrysler on health care before because he couldn't get his members to vote for it. There were only forty-nine thousand UAW workers left at Chrysler-about half what it had had when Daimler took over nine years earlier. The workforce had endured a miserable, prolonged downsizing and was deeply suspicious of management.

The feeling was mutual. After the union rejected their plea for relief on health care, Chrysler execs had given the UAW president a new nickname-Ron "Middlefinger." These talks could get ugly. At least Gettelfinger had had a relations.h.i.+p with Zetsche. He didn't know Bob Nardelli, and he didn't trust Cerberus, which had owned Chrysler for only two months.

Bargaining started right after Gettelfinger walked into the soaring lobby at Auburn Hills on October 5. The table was set. Nardelli, Tom LaSorda, and their people sat on one side, with Gettelfinger and his wingman, General Holiefield, the UAW vice president in charge of Chrysler, on the other. They were an interesting pair-Gettelfinger with his southern drawl, white mustache, and wire-rimmed gla.s.ses, and Holiefield, the union's highest-ranking African American, a three-hundred-pound former a.s.sembly-line worker from the east side of Detroit. The first session was rough. Gettelfinger was dead-set on "pattern" bargaining: Chrysler had to match everything GM gave the union. That meant the VEBA, the job commitments, the bonuses, the works. Besides that, there wasn't much to talk about.

Nardelli tried to give a "we're all in this together" speech. "Cerberus wants to restore Chrysler to its rightful place as an American icon," he said. "And we respect collective bargaining as part of that."

That was fine, Gettelfinger replied. But he wanted the same deal as GM, nothing more or less. Was Chrysler prepared to do that?

Nardelli said he didn't think that would be possible. There couldn't be any job guarantees, he said, at the "new Chrysler."

Things deteriorated pretty quickly from there. Holiefield got into a shouting match with John Franciosi, the wily old head of labor relations at Chrysler. After a few minutes, they started yelling and swearing at each other. Gettelfinger just sat there. Holiefield was his battering ram. And LaSorda didn't bat an eye. He had seen these two veteran negotiators go at it many times before and considered it healthy to get the venom out early. He expected these meetings to be extremely hostile at the start.

But Nardelli looked spooked when the insults started flying. He left in the middle of the meeting, making a show of turning things over to LaSorda, and went up to his new office on the fifteenth floor. He had decisions to make. And the first ones involved eliminating thousands of jobs-not negotiating to save them.

For nine years, every major decision at Chrysler had to go through Stuttgart. For most of that time, Zetsche had called the shots, and protected the interests of Auburn Hills. It would be hard to overstate how closely supervised Chrysler was; even mundane press releases were translated into German for approval before they were released in English. But the breakup was complete. Chrysler was on its own, left to drift away from its former owner. The Germans couldn't change their company's name back to Daimler fast enough. Chrysler was a bad memory, and the automotive merger of the century a regrettable failure.

Now instead of the Germans, Chrysler was overrun by Cerberus's SWAT team of specialists-lawyers, accountants, purchasing experts, human resource types. Nardelli brought in his own sidekicks, including his favorite PR man from New York, Bob Marston, and the flamboyant marketing consultant Peter Arnell, who had worked with Chrysler a few years before on a terribly expensive and ineffective ad campaign for minivans featuring the singer Celine Dion.

Feinberg had also hired Jim Press from Toyota. Press had been with Toyota for thirty-seven years and was known for his steady, cerebral approach to selling cars and nurturing the brand's impeccable image of safety, value, and reliability. But when executives in j.a.pan began making more decisions in the United States, Press's career had stalled. He made his availability known to GM and Ford, but was lured to Chrysler by Feinberg to be the co-president with LaSorda and a possible CEO down the road. "The way we talked about it was that when Chrysler got back on its feet, Bob would probably move to another of Cerberus's operations," Press said. "He was not here for the long term, and I was sort of his understudy."

But Nardelli didn't want or need Press around. When the two of them first sat down together, Nardelli didn't talk about cars or dealers or consumers. He walked over to a board in his office and taped up a single dollar bill.

"I have only one request, and it's very simple," Nardelli said, looking hard at Press. "I just want to make a dollar. Just make a dollar. Is that unreasonable? We're a $60 billion company, and we sell all these products. Shouldn't we at least make a dollar?"

Press didn't know what to say. How could he disagree with that? But the dramatics didn't seem necessary. It was pretty obvious that Chrysler was bleeding cash. And when Press dug into the company's weaknesses in its model lineup, the festering inventory issues, and the painfully dysfunctional dealer relations, he came to an unsettling conclusion. "I went from the best-managed company in the world to the worst in one day," he said. "And my instruction was, very simply, to help Chrysler make money."

That was Nardelli's mission-to get Chrysler to make money. He was a meticulous, disciplined, and obsessively organized individual, impeccably groomed from his razor-cut hair to his polished nails. Nardelli was totally focused on making sustained, sequential, incremental improvements in every corner of the business. He completely bought into Feinberg's patriotic pitch about saving the soul of American manufacturing. "I desperately want Chrysler to be successful," Nardelli said. "We don't need another strategy. What we need is execution."

He held a two-day workshop, dubbed "Recovery and Transformation," for the top three hundred executives and brought in consultants to teach statistics-driven management processes he had learned at GE. He was always intense and serious, and p.r.o.ne to taking off on intellectual tangents that were tough to follow. His first speech in Detroit left people shaking their heads at his sheer verbiage. "I am blessed to have individuals with me who can take responsibility," he said, "and do vertical dives to really get the granularity and make sure that we're coupling horizontally across functions so that we have a pure line of sight to the customer."

Inside Chrysler, the engineers and designers were a bit stunned by how Nardelli gave orders. In one week, he came up with two hundred specific improvements he wanted made to the interiors of its cars and trucks. He was all about decisions, lots of them, as if he were in a tremendous hurry to change everything he thought was wrong with Chrysler. And he was. Chrysler was essentially living on borrowed time and money. Cerberus paid less than $2 billion to Daimler, some of which the Germans put back into Chrysler as a contribution toward legacy costs. Cerberus had also invested $5 billion in Chrysler's operations and another chunk of money into its finance arm. That budget, along with the $10 billion in bank loans and another $2 billion in borrowed cash from Daimler and Cerberus, was what Nardelli had to work with.

That nest egg wasn't going to go very far if the business kept losing more than $100 million a month. So Nardelli and the Cerberus efficiency experts started cutting. Chrysler's U.S. market share had shrunk to 12 percent? Then eliminate s.h.i.+fts at five a.s.sembly plants. Poorly selling products were history-four models would be dumped, including the Pacifica and Magnum sport wagons that were centerpieces of the Zetsche era. And even though Chrysler had barely completed its Project X restructuring that cut thirteen thousand jobs, Nardelli was raring to do more. The next round would be just as deep. Another twelve thousand workers were about to be chopped.

With Nardelli scouring Chrysler for factory s.h.i.+fts to cut and jobs to eliminate, there was no way he could give the union the GM pattern agreement. And it didn't take long for Gettelfinger to figure that out. "The company has failed to make an offer that addresses the needs of our members.h.i.+p," he said in an e-mail to union locals. On October 7, he set a strike deadline. Chrysler had three days to give the UAW the same deal as General Motors or the union would shut it down.

This time Gettelfinger didn't want a strike. He took a more conciliatory approach with LaSorda than he had during the first health care talks. Management and labor at Chrysler had something in common: Daimler had broken promises to both of them.

LaSorda, whose grandfather was once president of a union local in Windsor, Canada, very effectively used the German merger mess to extract concessions on health care. First, Gettelfinger agreed to the $300 million savings on retiree benefits that the union had balked at in 2006. Then he gave Chrysler a better deal than GM on the VEBA by allowing it to use more stock and less cash to fund the $10 billion trust. But when it came to job guarantees, LaSorda was under strict orders from Cerberus not to give any.

"I can't do it, Ron," he told Gettelfinger. "We need the flexibility."

But Gettelfinger and Holiefield needed a.s.surances on jobs. Otherwise, they couldn't sell the contract to the UAW members. While the talks ground on, the GM workers were approving their deal by a two-thirds margin. It would not be that easy in the Chrysler plants. People were still steaming about Daimler, and the picket signs were all printed up and ready to go.

As the hours ticked by in the bas.e.m.e.nt of Chrysler headquarters, Gettelfinger was feeling the most pressure. He pushed LaSorda hard to give him something positive in the deal, some kind of a commitment. Nardelli's mush about the "new Chrysler" wasn't going to placate workers if they didn't get any job guarantees.

Finally, late in the evening on October 9, LaSorda met the union halfway. First, Chrysler would back off from selling its parts centers, saving union jobs in the process. Second, he could pledge to keep 80 percent of Chrysler's fifty-three U.S. factories running for the full four-year contract. That was it. He wouldn't agree to specific products in specific plants, and no commitments at all beyond 2011.

Just after ten in the morning on October 10, Gettelfinger and Holiefield gave a summary to the nine senior members of the national negotiating team. The two union bosses had been bargaining for sixty straight hours; they were exhausted. After the presentation, they left the room for a few minutes. And when Gettelfinger walked back in, he got the shock of his career.

"We can't accept this," said Bill Parker, the president of Local 1700 at the Sterling Heights a.s.sembly plant and chairman of the negotiating committee. "We voted to reject it."

A proposed agreement recommended by the UAW president had never been turned down by a bargaining team before. But a deadline is a deadline. And at exactly eleven o'clock the union went on strike against Chrysler. Workers dropped what they were doing, walked out of the plants, grabbed their picket signs, and started marching outside factories across the country. At the sprawling car plant in Sterling Heights just north of Detroit, workers had no idea what was happening with the negotiating team. They just knew it was time for a show of force. "They say strike, so we strike," said Reggie Redding, a thirteen-year veteran at the plant. But unlike the spirited crowds outside the GM plants in September, the Chrysler picketers seemed pretty subdued. "I'm not angry," said Joseph Badalamenti, who worked in the paint shop in Sterling Heights. "I'm just worried about what's going on."

The Chrysler executives didn't know what was going on either. Nardelli was dumbfounded. "I thought we had a deal," he kept saying. LaSorda was just as confused. Gettelfinger had agreed to the terms, but something crazy must have happened with the committee.

Down in Chrysler's bas.e.m.e.nt, Holiefield was trying to sway opinion on the bargaining team. He told them this was the best they were going to get. They had to back the leaders.h.i.+p-it was the way the union worked. He begged them to vote again.

They did, and they rejected the contract again. This was becoming big trouble. It felt like a mutiny was taking place. Gettelfinger and LaSorda needed to huddle and fast. The union needed more, another promise, anything that would stop this insurrection. Couldn't Cerberus at least take outsourcing out of the equation? After talking it over with Nardelli, LaSorda agreed to the change.

Gettelfinger and Holiefield rushed the new deal through for a third vote, and they finally got their approval, by a margin of eight to one. Bill Parker was the lone dissenter. The news went out through the union grapevine, and at 5:22 P.M. the strike was over. The pattern agreement had held on wages, bonuses, and health care, but it fell short of GM on the all-important job guarantees.

Workers putting down their picket signs weren't sure what they had achieved by walking out. "I think the whole strike was a lot of hype," said Bill Gresham, a tool-and-die maker at a Chrysler engine plant in Detroit. "We're the losers here, not Cerberus."

Five days later, Chrysler union leaders from across the country met in Detroit to discuss the deal. It was a raucous, contentious session. The details of the tentative agreement upset some of them. Parker, the dissenting voice in the committee vote, argued that the contract fell too far short of what GM workers had gotten. "This is a devastating break from the pattern," he said.

Some plants, such as the minivan factory in St. Louis, were protected only if sales volumes stayed at a certain level. And other plants were labeled "non-core" a.s.sets that might be closed. Holiefield tried to calm down the dissenters. "We did our very best," he said. "I believe once the members view it, they will support it."

Voting began on October 20, and three of the first six plants turned down the deal. Then Jefferson North, the big Detroit factory where Holiefield hailed from, overwhelmingly rejected it. A Big Three contract backed by the union leaders.h.i.+p hadn't been rejected by the members in twenty-five years. The last time was in 1982, also at Chrysler.

No way could Gettelfinger afford to let the vote fail. He still had to go to Ford, and a rejection at Chrysler would throw off the timetable completely. He began lobbying hard, calling the local unions and pumping them up to get a positive vote. When two big plants in Indiana voted against the deal, the overall national tally was almost dead even: half the members were for it and half against. It was all coming down to four union locals outside Detroit-Sterling Heights a.s.sembly and stamping, and the Dodge Truck a.s.sembly and stamping plants in Warren.

And on October 24, the agreement pa.s.sed in all four plants. In the end, workers couldn't handle the uncertainty anymore. They just wanted some security. "Right now is a bad time to strike," said Melro Brooks, a thirty-four-year Chrysler worker. "Twenty years ago, sure, we were the Big Three then. But we're not so big anymore."

On November 1, Gettelfinger was ready for Ford. But just as he was heading over to Dearborn, Chrysler announced it was slas.h.i.+ng twelve thousand jobs, including as many as ten thousand union positions. That wasn't all. Five plants were losing s.h.i.+fts, including Sterling Heights and Jefferson North. Chrysler would still keep 80 percent of its union workers through the contract-as promised. But the other 20 percent were history.

"It's pretty shady to have layoffs right after the contract is ratified," Anthony Majka, a worker in Sterling Heights, told the Detroit News. Lydia Johnson, another worker at the plant, just shook her head. "It's sad," she said. "I guess promises don't mean that much."

At Ford, Gettelfinger pulled aside one of the company's senior negotiators. "Do you know anything," he asked him, "about Project Compa.s.s?"

The Ford executive was taken aback. How had Gettelfinger found out about that? He mumbled something about it being a mutual-aid pact and then shut up.

"Well, one thing I know about you," Gettelfinger said, "is that you don't lie."

The union president had known all about Project Compa.s.s and that Ford had backed away from it at the last minute. One of his bankers at Lazard had been tipped off to it. Gettelfinger was impressed that Ford had refused to come to General Motors' aid in the strike. He figured that was Bill Ford's decision, and he was right. "The UAW is Bill's ace in the hole," Joe Laymon said. "He wouldn't do anything to screw that up."

The atmosphere at Ford was more positive than at either GM or Chrysler. Bill Ford and Alan Mulally were both at the table. Gettelfinger was willing to give more too. He would allow Ford to use mostly stock for its $13 billion VEBA, and he let Ford hire more lower-wage workers than at the other two companies.

Ford gave concessions as well, promising to take two a.s.sembly plants off the Way Forward closing list for the time being. The negotiations were moving like a freight train headed downhill. Different bargaining groups were meeting simultaneously on the second, sixth, and eleventh floors of Ford headquarters. By eight o'clock on Friday night, November 2, several dead-tired members of the Ford and union teams went home for the night. They were close to a deal and figured a good night's rest would have everyone fresh to wrap it up over the weekend.

But Gettelfinger wasn't ready to stop. He prowled the darkened halls of the Gla.s.s House, looking in offices and wondering where the bargainers had gone. He ended up at Laymon's door. Where, he asked, was everybody?

They had quit for the night, Laymon said, and would resume first thing in the morning.

"Get their a.s.ses back in here!" Gettelfinger said. "Let's finish the deal."

Laymon got on the phone and within an hour the teams had rea.s.sembled. Even Mulally-unlike Wagoner or Nardelli-was present at the main table for the last stages of the talks. At 3:20 A.M. they were finished. Ford and the union had reached an agreement without a hint of a strike.

On November 14, Ford workers overwhelmingly ratified the deal. "New Era Begins for Big 3" was the front-page headline in the Detroit News. Wall Street and industry a.n.a.lysts overwhelmingly endorsed the unprecedented accomplishments at the bargaining table: health care trusts, two-tier wages, scaled-back jobs bank, bonuses instead of pay hikes.

The day that GM workers approved their new contract, the company's stock price soared to $42-its highest point in more than three years. But for all the talk of a new era, the fundamentals hadn't changed much. The Big Three's car sales were still weak, and trucks were slipping. The health care deals wouldn't impact actual spending for another two years, the buyouts had drained mountains of cash from the balance sheets, and still there were no profits in North America.

The perception of Detroit was positive, but the reality was as fragile as ever. On November 6, the illusion of progress was shattered when GM reported a record quarterly loss of $39 billion. Its actual operating loss was only $1.6 billion, but it had taken a ma.s.sive, unexpected accounting charge. Tax credits it had built up over years of losses had to be wiped off the books because there was no foreseeable income to apply them to. Bottom line: GM didn't know when it would start making money again. But it wouldn't be anytime soon.

By mid-November, the optimism surrounding GM began to evaporate. The stock price dropped to $26. The housing market was faltering, gas prices were climbing, and showroom traffic was drying up. And the road ahead was looking rough. "We do have concerns," said Fritz Henderson, "over near-term economic conditions."

Chapter Twenty-Three.

It was one of those moments, when months of soul-searching suddenly sparked a decision. It came to Jim Farley while he was driving on the 405 freeway through Los Angeles. He punched a number into his cell phone, and a few seconds later he was talking to Bill Ford.

"I think it's time," Farley said. "I'd be interested in talking if that North American job is open."

"That's great," Bill said. "But you've got to meet Alan. You've got to talk to Alan. I'll set it up."

Farley couldn't believe he had finally made the call. In the two years since he met Bill at the Detroit auto show, Farley's career at Toyota had been on a steep upward trajectory. He excelled as the U.S. marketing chief for the Toyota brand, successfully launched the new Tundra pickup, and earned a promotion to group vice president in charge of the Lexus luxury division. While the Big Three muddled along, Toyota was smas.h.i.+ng sales records and making more money than any car company in the world. Farley was a star player on a winning team with a bright future.

So why was he on his way to a clandestine meeting with Alan Mulally at the L.A. airport?

There were lots of reasons. His life had taken a terrible turn when his wife delivered twins prematurely and both babies died. In his grief, Farley started questioning his values, his goals, and his legacy. He kept turning to that spring afternoon in Detroit when he walked among the ruins of the Ford Model T plant where his grandfather worked. Was it his destiny to sell $60,000 Lexus sedans? Did he want to play it safe, climb the corporate ladder, and help the j.a.panese conquer the industry? Or should he take a chance, follow his heart, and be part of a comeback of the Ford Motor Company? Seventeen years at Toyota meant a lot to him-he had his friends, his reputation, his accomplishments. But he kept thinking back to those tiny infants he'd held in his hands, two beautiful little lives that never had an opportunity to do great things. What would they have wanted their daddy to do?

Farley pulled into the parking lot of the private hangar at LAX and realized he was sweating profusely. He took a long breath, held it a few seconds, and then walked into the building. And there was Mulally, waiting in the lobby. He bounded over and grabbed Farley's hand.